You'll Always See the Draft: How Our Review Process Works

The single most common worry we hear from interview subjects isn't about money. It's this: "What if you make me say something I didn't mean?" It's a completely reasonable fear. Being misquoted — or quoted accurately but framed unfairly — can follow a person around for years. So we built our process around a simple, non-negotiable promise: you always see the draft before anything is published.

This piece explains what that promise means in practice, what you can and can't change, and why the line we draw is good for you as well as for us.

When you see it, and in what form

After we've interviewed you and completed our fact-checking, we send you the full draft of the piece — not a summary, not a list of your quotes in isolation, but the actual article as it will appear, headline and all. You get a reasonable window to review it, typically several days, and a direct line to the editor who wrote it.

You read it the way a reader will, in context. That context matters: a quote that looks stark on its own often reads perfectly fair inside the paragraph it belongs to.

Draft review isn't a formality we tack on at the end. It's the safety mechanism the whole process is built to support.

What you can change

You have real power over accuracy. Specifically, you can:

Correct factual errors. Wrong title, wrong date, a misremembered figure, a garbled technical explanation — flag it and we fix it. Getting facts right is our job, and we're grateful when you catch something we missed.
Fix misquotes and misrepresentations. If a quote doesn't reflect what you meant, we'll rework it so it does. If the framing genuinely distorts your position, we'll address it.
Clarify nuance. Experts often want to add a caveat that makes a claim more precise. We welcome that; precision is the point.
Remove genuinely sensitive material. If you realize you shared something you shouldn't have — a detail under embargo, a colleague's unpublished work — tell us and we'll take it out.

What you can't do

Here's where we're honest, because a promise with no limits isn't credible. Draft review is not a license to rewrite the article into marketing copy. So you can't:

Delete accurate, fairly reported facts simply because they're inconvenient.
Replace the journalist's voice with your own. The framing, structure, and independent observations belong to the writer.
Insert promotional language that would turn an editorial piece into an advertisement.

This isn't us being difficult. It's the exact line that makes the coverage valuable. A publication runs our work because it's independent journalism. The moment a subject controls the copy, it becomes advertising — and both the outlet and its readers can tell. Protecting that line protects the credibility you're getting the story for in the first place.

A worked example

An abstract rule is easier to trust with a concrete case, so here's a composite of a situation we see often. Imagine we interview a founder who, mid-conversation, describes a rocky early period at their company with refreshing candour. In the draft, that honesty reads beautifully — it's the most human, most credible part of the piece. Then draft review arrives, and the founder gets nervous: could we cut the difficult bit and just keep the wins?

Here's how we'd handle it. If the passage is inaccurate — if we misremembered a date or overstated how bad things got — we fix it without hesitation; that's a factual correction and it's exactly what review is for. If the passage is accurate but the founder simply feels exposed, we talk it through. We'll explain that the candid section is what makes readers trust the rest, that removing it would make the piece read like marketing, and that the story is stronger and more useful to them with it. Nine times out of ten, once the fear is named, the founder agrees to keep it. And if they genuinely can't live with it, we look for a way to characterize the period fairly and less starkly — or, in the rare case where no honest version works for everyone, the piece doesn't run. Nobody is ever cornered.

Why this is different from "quote approval"

Some readers in the media world will notice that showing a source the full draft is more generous than the industry norm, and worry it edges toward "quote approval" — letting sources sanitize their own coverage. It's a fair concern, so here's the distinction we hold. Quote approval, at its worst, hands a source editorial control and lets them launder their message. What we offer is accuracy review with a hard boundary: you can fix what's wrong and unfair, you cannot rewrite what's true and inconvenient, and the writer's independent framing is not up for negotiation. The generosity is on facts and fairness; the firmness is on independence. Keeping both at once is the whole craft.

What happens if we disagree

Disagreements are rare, and almost all of them dissolve once we talk. Usually a subject wants a change we can happily make, or we can explain why a passage that felt uncomfortable is actually fair and well-sourced. We approach these conversations assuming good faith on both sides.

Occasionally we can't reach a version everyone is comfortable with. When that happens, the piece doesn't run. You are never forced to live with a story you fundamentally object to. That's the ultimate backstop, and it's why draft review is a genuine protection rather than a rubber stamp.

Why we do it this way

Some newsrooms guard against ever showing sources a draft, worried about losing editorial control. We take a different view for a specific reason: our subjects are usually technical experts, and the risk of getting a nuanced claim subtly wrong is high. Letting the person who knows the material best check it makes the journalism more accurate, not less. Combined with a firm line against promotional editing, we get the best of both — precision and independence.

It also, frankly, builds trust. When we tell someone up front that they'll see the draft, the interview that follows is more open and more useful. People say the interesting thing when they're not afraid of being ambushed.

The technical details that make it real

A promise is only as good as its mechanics, so here are ours. We send the draft as a document you can read at your own pace, not a link that expires in an hour or a phone call where quotes are read aloud too fast to absorb. You get a named editor to reply to directly, so your feedback goes to a person rather than a void. And we build the review window into our schedule from the start — it isn't squeezed into a panicked afternoon before deadline, because a review you have no time to do properly isn't a review at all.

We also keep a simple record of what changed and why. If you flag an error and we fix it, that's logged; if we decline a requested change, we tell you the reason rather than quietly ignoring it. None of this is glamorous, but it's the difference between a genuine safeguard and a box-ticking ritual. The mechanics are how the principle survives contact with a busy newsroom.

The promise, one more time

You will see your piece before it's published. You can fix anything inaccurate or unfair. You can't turn it into an ad, and if we can't agree, it doesn't run. That's the whole deal, and it's the same for everyone — the first-time founder and the Nobel laureate alike.

If you'd like to see how this fits into the wider process, start with What to Expect When Inkego Reaches Out, or read our full editorial standards.